It would be nice to have the following: * email for the family, e.g., python-the- cichlid@greenspun.com to forward wherever * places for family members to create personal Web sites, in the pre-Weblog days I would have said that these would be subdirectories off the root * RSS feeds to which interested friends can subscribe; it would be nice if someone could say "I want to see new stuff by Benjamin and Harry but not from Philip" or "I want to see everything new" * easy to upload and update content in various formats (text, photos, sound, video) by young family members using Web browsers alone * long-run potential for doing some scripting and database programming (though this will not be an online community-style site; the Internet is too full of spam these days to make that worthwhile at a family level) * if there is scripting it should be done in some tools that are likely to be popular in 2015 or 2020 when we are likely next to examine the server * an annual cost of under $250 (Uncle Philip needs to save up for his turbine-powered helicopter) Where to host this and what software to run? Also a solution from the comments TypePad.com from the Movable Type guys runs $150/year for the pro version, which allows unlimited weblogs, each of which can have their own domain map, so presumably you could do nephewname.greenspun.com and petname.greenspun.com etc. The system has special features for photo galleries, weblogs, lists, comments, etc. There are pre-designed templates which are fully customizable, and you can drop down to the HTML level either for templates of even to upload raw files. RSS is automatic for each weblog, so people can just subscribe to who they want to subscribe to. (Note that because "weblog" in this context just means "Web page with a special template," you can post "regular" Web pages through this system quite easily.) You can layer on top of this directnic.com, which for $15/year lets you do the email forwarding and will route your subdomains to TypePad servers as needed (I think each map is ~$5). You can put up to 1GB on the account, and upload whatever files you like The system seems ideally suited for admin by a youngster because you can do so much through the Web interface. Nevertheless this setup isn't going to allow scripting and db access, you would need to add on another account for that. For programming/Web dev I use Linode.com which gives you your own private Linux Kernel on a monster Dell server with gobs of processor and disk. You get root and to pick your own Linux distro. I pay $40/month for 128MB, I have heard of other folks running comfortably with a mail server, Web server, database and scripting in this amount of RAM but personally I have zero desire to push it beyond just the Web server, compiled-in perl interpreter and a database. Of course this is the "build it all yourself" option. AND ANOTHER Check out TextDrive.com. Basically, hosting for hackers by hackers (in the old-school, best sense of the word). They seem to have a clue. They just debuted Strongspace which is pretty nice for e.g. personal backups. John • 8/15/05; 7:14:38 PM